Beko Pharm

What are your experience?

My last “real” Windows experience was with WinXP and every time I have to touch Windows at the PC of a customer, which happens sometimes when the stars align, I feel like the first human that ever walked the earth.

I have no idea how people get any work done on a system that is constantly nagging for attention, popups, restrictive Enterprise environment and non descriptive error messages. Nothing in this world seems to make sense or is presented in a unified way. Every dialogue or sub system seems to be it’s own isle stemming from another decade of tech. The experience for someone who is simply not used to Windows any more due to missing exposure is horrible.

Heck a Mac feels alien to me too but in the end that’s still a system I could deal with given some time.

Mebbe I’m spoiled by stuff like systemd, PipeWire, Wayland, btrfs and all that candy we get nowadays on a Linux desktop. I’m not even talking about privacy or FOSS principles at this point. Just the fact that the system doesn’t get in my face with ads or AI or “very important reboots” seems to be a revelation in 2024.

Whenever I order I always get a male and female connector because the terminology doesn’t seem to be consistent across connector designs.

Heh, there are a lot of unusual designs that are neither and both too :D Connectors are wild.

This. It’s basically only a thing for rotary encoder, where interrupts should be used for the reading, so they don’t miss a beat.

Also: Combining several joystick devices on the PC again is a pain in the neck especially if the game only supports one device of each kind.

X4: Foundations

Can relate 🤓

Only thing I’m missing is “real” head tracking. There is simply none in the Linux version and while I can map a virtual joystick driven by OpenTrack to each camera corner it’s just not the same. Sadly this is not exposed via LUA or I’d have wired up a UDP connection by now. So this feature sadly works only via Proton. Still sticking with the native Linux version though. It’s faster.

Watt the…

Same :) Not a SDF member but grinning inside every time I see the logo 🤓

Why yes it’s a SAS drive. You can find that in some NAS models for home use too. Otherwise this is usually server land.

The thing with HBAs is that you usually only get virtual disks on the system side because the controller masks the real disks. This is not really needed any more since modern filesystems can do RAID functionality too - and even better and faster - but that does require direct access to the drive.

Many controllers can be patched though or come with a pass through (JBOD) mode out of the box, which allows you to use that kind of drive directly again. Such drives can be obtained used for cheap too so this may be a feasible option to extend the possible amount of drives for a desktop computer at home too a lot. Most controllers support 4-8 devices.

KiCAD is good and has no vendor lock-in.

There are very good beginner tutorials and videos explaining typical workflows.

It features also stuff like auto-routing, error checking, part lists and 3D previews.